A search may be as simple as inputting a single newsgroup title like "newsguy.general", which would take you directly to the "newsguy.general" group through our Direct Read News web interface, or it could be a compound search that would locate a collection of groups based on a string of keywords and wildcard characters that you might put together...

comp.systems.*|alt.fan.*|^news.admin.&|*.sport*|rec.boat*|*.jobs.*

The Newsgroup Search engine will accept a variety of "wildcard" characters, which will aid you in finding a broad or specific collection of newsgroups, based on the way you couple the "wildcard" characters with keywords in the search field. These characters are described in further detail below.

"*" - The asterisk symbol is a wild card search character. As an example, *.sports.* would find newsgroups that have the word sports in their newsgroup title, sports.* would find all groups that start with the word sports, and *.sports would find all groups that end with the word sports.

"|" - The pipe symbol is used to join multiple searches. As an example sports.*|*.sports would list all groups that started with the word sports or ended with the word sports. It could also be used to search related newsgroups that might appear in different Usenet hierarchies, such as alt.sports.*|rec.sports.* which would find all newsgroups in the "alt" (Alternative) or "rec" (Recreation) hierarchies that utilized the word sports in their group titles.

"&" - The ampersand symbol is a limiting character, meaning a search will only yield groups with one word beyond the "&" symbol. As an example, comp.& would retrieve a newsgroup title like "comp.ai" which only had two words in its title, while a group like  "comp.ai.alife" would not be retrieved in this example because the title contains more than two total words.

"^" - This symbol is another limiting character, meaning the search will only detect newsgroup titles with no other characters to the left of the "^" symbol. As an example ^rec would pick up all newsgroups starting with the word "rec", but would ignore a newsgroup like "alt.recreation" because it does not begin with the word "rec" in this example.

In addition to the typical search requests mentioned above, we've included some other examples of how "wildcard" characters and keywords can be used together to find collections of newsgroups that might be of interest to you. As mentioned, these are just a few examples, and we encourage you to experiment with different types of search combinations that best match the kind of newsgroups you might be looking for.

^comp.*  - A search request like this would list all "comp" (Computer) newsgroups that appear in the comp category of groups. The "^" symbol prevents the search from picking up a newsgroups that doesn't begin with the word "comp".

• This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
  comp.forsale
  comp.pc.forsale
  comp.pc.ibm.forsale
  comp.misc

• It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
  alt.comp.dataconversion
  aus.computers
  chile.comp.www
  de.comp.periph.cdrom

*.pc.* - A search request like this would list any newsgroup on the news server that had the word ".pc." anywhere in its title.

• This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
  comp.ibm.pc.hardware
  comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer
  demon.ip.support.pc.announce
  ger.pc.os2

• It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
  alt.bbs.pcboard
  alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
  br.pc-l
  alt.hk.spcc

comp.& - This search request would only display newsgroup titles in the "comp" (Computer) hierarchy, which only had two total words in the overall title.

• This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
  comp.databases
  comp.forsale
  comp.misc
  comp.software-eng

• It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
  comp.admin.policy
  comp.archives.ms-windows.announce
  comp.cad.autocad
  comp.databases.visual-dbase

comp*|*.pc.*  - This compound search would list all the newsgroups in the "comp" hierarchy, in addition to all of the newsgroups that had the word ".pc." in their titles, regardless of the hierarchy those particular "pc" groups fell under.

• This search would find the following types of newsgroup titles:
  comp.ai.genetic
  comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
  fido7.hardw.pc.video
  symantec.support.devtools.pc.visual-cafe.java

• It would not display the following types of newsgroup titles:
  alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
  alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++
  alt.sys.pc-clone.dell
  aus.computers.mac

As mentioned earlier, since the search engine directs you to specific newsgroups, or lists of newsgroups that can be accessed through our Direct Read News web interface with a web browser, these newsgroups or group lists can be bookmarked within your browser to form future shortcuts to your favorite discussion forums.